Bedrich Rios

Every creative professional needs a great set of tools and a web designer is no exception. And as if we didn’t have enough difficulty coming up with a design every other week (a bit of an exaggeration but you get the point), more often than not, we find ourselves hunting down needed design elements through Google.  Therefore, I have decided to share 15 of my favorite “freebies” sites with you. These are sites that contain free non-commercial as well as for-commercial use icons, fonts, and Photoshop patterns. Please make sure to read the copyright text before using these free materials.

Free Icons

1. Dry Icons
   “All icon sets at DryIcons.com are carefully designed and developed by our team of professional web and graphic designers. We designed the DryIcons website to bring your applications the best professional appearance.”
2. TurboMilk
   “These icons packs is free to use for personal non-commercial purposes. Please give credits to http://www.turbomilk.com in case of public use. We sincerely hope that these icons will make you happy and nobody get hurt.”
3. Free Icons
   “Here you will find the best free icons from the icon artists,The icons copyright belongs original authors, They are free for personal and non commercial use / free for public non-commercial use only mention the authors. If you are an icon designer and want to showcase your Icons, logos , prints , web ui or web design resources, Here is the best place!”
4. IconBuffet
   “So here’s the deal… a few years back we launched the original IconBuffet. At the time we sold stock icons to web designers and other geeky folks all over the world. After a while we figured it would be totally sweet to give away free icons every month to IconBuffet members. Only there’s a little twist… not everyone gets the same icons. So you have to swap icons with your friends to get them all. Kinda like baseball cards. Only you can use them on your website.”
5. Fast Icon
   This is a site filled with free high quality icons. In addition, a lot of their sets contain theme based icon packs.

Free Fonts

1. Fawnt
   “Fawnt is a font resource for designers, developers, and anyone that appreciates the web’s highest quality fonts.”
2. dafont
   A great place to find the perfect font for that next project. This site is most valuable when you are looking for similar font families and not necessarily a specific one.
3. UrbanFonts
   “See our amazing collection of free fonts and free dingbats. With over 8,000 freeware fonts, you’ve come to the best place to download fonts. Please review our FAQs section for font installation instructions.”
4. FontStruct
   “FontStruct is a free font-building tool brought to you by the world’s leading retailer of digital type, FontShop. FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks. You create ‘FontStructions’ using the ‘FontStructor’ font editor.
5. FontCubes
   “Welcome to Font Cubes. Here you’ll find the best free PC fonts and free Mac Fonts from the best font artists in the world. The fonts listed in our free font collection are their author’s property. Please contact their authors for further consultation regarding the use of the listed fonts.”

Free Patterns

1. Adobe - Photoshop Patterns
   The title says it all. This site contains free patterns shared by the Adobe community.
2. DinPattern
   “All patterns available here are free to use. I design these patterns just out of fun, and make no money from them. But, if you feel you have gotten some good use out of them, and like to leave a tip, feel free to donate some pocket change to keep this site going…”
3. Squidfingers
   “Feel free to use any of these patterns on your own site. If you do decide use one, a credit link back to my site is always greatly appreciated.”
4. Kaliber10000
   “As the name implies, this section of K10k is a resource for deliciously pixellated patterns. Please be nice & give credit to the creators if you use them in your projects, and remember to adhere to the usage-guidelines for each individual pattern.”
5. Brusheezy
   “Welcome to Brusheezy.com! A place for artists to download and vote for the best custom Photoshop Brushes and photoshop patterns on the internet!”

One Last Thing

The websites above are by no means affiliated, endorsed, or promoted by me, this blog, or anything else on this site. Furthermore, the content within the quote marks are excerpt from their respective sites. Please feel free, encouraged, to leave a comment with your own favorite resources.

I posted this article on Sunday, June 8th, 2008. Is filed under Free Stuff, Web Resources. If you liked what you read, please digg it by using the button on the left. Also, you can subscribe to my RSS feed and read more articles like this one.